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Here’s How to Manage the Full Lifecycle of Your Digital Lessons

02/26/18

The following trends in K-12 are driving dramatic changes in the "what" and "how" is taught and learned:

Textbooks — decreasing: Paper-based books, the mainstay of K-12 of education, are going the way of the dinosaur. But textbooks, and their accompanying guides, have provided teachers with scope-and-sequenced, standards-aligned, curriculum… forever! What is replacing this cornerstone of the classroom?

Digital curricula — increasing: There are literally millions of OER — open education resources — freely available on a multitude of OER marketplaces. Curriki.org, the oldest OER website, is one of our favorites. Of course, finding that one video or that one article can be a challenge.

1-to-1 is the New Normal — More than half of America’s classrooms already are 1-to-1 – every child has a computing device. By 2022 virtually 100% of America’s classroom will be 1-to-1.

The implication of these three trends is clear: The days of "teacher lecturing at the front of the classroom, assigning readings from a paper-based textbook" are numbered.

To support the transition to digital curricula, the digital cobblers at the Intergalactic Mobile Learning Center (IMLC) have developed — and are making freely available — the Collabrify Roadmap Platform (CoRP), an integrated suite of device-independent tools. Just go to http://roadmap.center — and sign in using a Google account. CoRP runs inside a browser: Chrome, Safari, Firefox. (Currently, CoRP does not run inside Microsoft browsers.) Since those browsers run on virtually all computing devices — tablets, laptops, Chromebooks, smartphones, etc. — CoRP is "device independent."

At http://roadmap.center a teacher, for example, can create a deeply-digital, highly-interactive lesson — which we call a Roadmap — by stitching together 3-7 OER digital objects, e.g., a video, a reading from a website, a PDF, a simulation, along with constructive activities such as writing, concept mapping, drawing, etc. Those constructive activities can be solo — each student does her/his own writing, concept mapping, etc. or — consistent with the movement to increase student collaboration — those constructive activities can be done collaboratively. CoRP supports the use of the tools in the G-Suite as well as the Collabrify Productivity Tools — G-Suite-like "collabrified" apps, but apps with interfaces that we designed expressly for the younger crowd (grades 1-5).

Most importantly, the Collabrify Roadmap Platform goes beyond simply supporting lesson building and supports educators and students in manipulating a Roadmap — a deeply-digital, highly-interactive lesson — during the various stages of the lesson’s life-cycle. As a reminder: all the following functionality is available at one URL: http://roadmap.center:

Create a new Roadmap: Start from scratch and use virtually any URL on the internet — or any OER — as an element of a digital lesson. The lesson-building tool in CoRP is absolutely open. Complement those reading, watching, exploring learning activities with constructive activities, e.g., answering questions, developing a concept map. Ask the students to take a quiz created in Google Forms – and have the quiz graded automatically!

Modify an existing Roadmap: Access the Roadmap Repository — a growing database of Roadmaps created by teachers. Find a Roadmap that you can use as-is tomorrow in your classroom — or find one that just needs a bit of tweaking , e.g., add/delete/modify a digital resource or two.

Distribute the Roadmap: After creating a "class" — much like one would do to create a class in Google Classroom — a teacher can distribute a Roadmap to students in that class. Students find their Roadmaps at http://start.roadmap.center. They just login with their Google account and bingo bongo, there are the Roadmaps sent to them by their teacher ready for enactment! Now, a teacher can specify that each student get her/his own Roadmap. Alternatively, the teacher can create collaborative groups (students X, Y, Z in one group; students A and B in a second group, etc.) and CoRP knows how to properly duplicate the Roadmaps to permit students X, Y, and Z to work synchronously on a concept map assignment, for example.

Monitor the enactment of a Roadmap: Like LanSchool, CoRP enables teachers to monitor their students’ online activities in real-time. For example, join students A and B as they, collaboratively, are creating a concept map. If the teacher’s computer is connected to a big screen in the classroom, the teacher can stop the class and have whole class engage in a discussion about what Students A and B are doing — or not doing.

Post-enactment, access each student’s files: As the constructive applications supported by CoRP are Google Drive-backed, all of a student’s files are stored in one place: the student’s Google Drive. While we are not being critical, CoRP does put a friendlier face on the Google Drive to make it that much easier to access students’ files.

Share a Roadmap: Completing the cycle, a teacher can share a Roadmap by posting it into the Roadmap Repository, thereby supporting a community of Roadmap creators and users.

PHEW! That is a great deal of functionality! However, we have tried to design CoRP to be accessible. Please — and we say this most sincerely — tell us how to make it better, how to make CoRP easier to learn, easier to use.

And, while the Collabrify Roadmap Platform is absolutely usable today — as teachers literally all over the world are already doing — we will be enhancing CoRP over the coming months. For example, we will be adding:

eHallway: To facilitate text chatting (e.g., teachers with teachers in the Roadmap Repository, teachers with students as the teacher is monitoring her/his students) we will be putting in a chat facility. "eHallway" sounds like an appropriate channel for that functionality.

Learning Analytics: Teachers always ask us: "as they are working collaboratively, who is really doing the work – Student A or Student B?" CoRP has those data and we will be exposing those data to teachers and students shortly.

Deeply-digital, highly interactive curricula are fast becoming the new normal — such materials are needed in order to take advantage of those newly minted 1-to-1 classrooms. The Collabrify Roadmap Platform at http://roadmap.center is a free resource designed to take the burden out of creating and using this new generation of curricula.

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